Income inequality has risen sharply in the United States over the past generation, reaching levels not seen since before World War II. But while almost two-thirds of Americans agree with the statement that 'income differences in the United States are too large', policies aimed at reducing income...

This paper examines whether retirement-income systems allow older individuals to enjoy socially acceptable income levels independent of paid work (decommodification) and the family (defamilialization). Little research has investigated the degree to which decommodification and defamilialization...

This article analyzes the determinants of market income distribution and governmental redistribution. The dependent variables are LIS data on market income inequality (measured by the Gini index) for households with a head aged 25 to 59 and the percent reduction in the Gini index by taxes and...

The purpose of this paper is to review recent data made available through the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) that include expenditures and asset valuations. The LIS data are augmented with comparable data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey. The surveys with expenditure data are reviewed in...

Social vulnerability due to insufficient income and earnings may come from many sources, both demographic and economic, in a globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population aging, low wages, growing inequality, and insufficient social spending. Vulnerable groups such as...

We introduce an extension of the Esteban and Ray [Econometrica, 1994] measure of polarization that can be applied to density functions. As a by-product we also derive the Wolfson [AER, 1994] measure as a special case. This derivation has the virtue of casting both measures in the context of a...

This paper presents a new framework for analyzing inequality that moves beyond the anonymity postulate. We estimate the determinants of sectoral choice and the joint distributions of outcomes across sectors. We determine which components of realized earnings variability are due to uncertainty...